Biological determinism

The thing is that it's not particularly one or the other (nature or nurture.)

Personality and behaviour is a a complex mix of nature, nurture and accident.

Humans are extremely social creatures. I've just been reading this random vox pop article that I found linked to articles on genetics about social contagion: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jan/24/the-five-emotional-contagion?CMP=

The research linked within it seems to be very much centred on being used to help reduce inner city violence and violence in Schools, mostly male dominated

Copying is one way we learn: The language of the group, after all, is “contagious” to developing babies. The behaviors that are most contagious are those that are the most emotionally engaging as well as the ones carried out by the people who are most relevant to you. Salience is key when it comes to the copying response.

The second mechanism of emotional contagion is the brain’s dopaminee* system, which works in anticipation of a reward. “Activation of that system puts you down a pathway toward what is important socially and for survival,” he says. If you anticipate that you will be rewarded for responding to someone with anger or violence, you are more likely to get on that behavioral track.

If you veer off or are shut out from getting a reward, Slutkin says, the brain’s pain centers are activated. “A sense of I can’t stand it lights up in the context of disapproval.” That’s the third part of this intricate biological system that keeps you on a path of emulating peers. In the case of the inner-city violence (and even school and other mass shootingss*) that Slutkin works to reduce, the path might be paved by a group that is thought to expect you to shoot someone who insults or betrays you and rewards you for doing so. If you don’t, you’ll be excluded.

We only need to spend a short time looking at toys and clothing for children to see how the "rewards" for behaviour is aggressively marketed to children from a young age, even if not within the family home.

My youngest likes the odd Lego magazine. Ninjago is all action and heroism. There are female characters but most are male.

A Lego friends magazine he got recently (Lego friends is marketed 'for girls') had an awful lot about tidying up your bedroom and being very kind. Which riled me somewhat - there's never any of that in ninjago! There are some male characters in Lego Friends but it's all very stereotypically female.

Lego city is more neutral thankfully, but he's never as keen on that.

Both my boys had cottoned on to basic gendered stereotypes from around the age of 2. By 3 we were having arguments about what colours boys and girls could like, despite all my attempts to be neutral.

let toys be toys and clothes be clothes have done lots of research on commercial gender stereotyping (both originated from mumsnet)

Gina Rippon "the gendered brain" also looks at similar ideas to Fine from a neuroscience perspective.

Fine and Rippon collaborated on this too

sfonline.barnard.edu/neurogenderings/eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-sex-gender-brains-and-behavior-a-guide-for-academics-journalists-parents-gender-diversity-advocates-social-justice-warriors-tweeters-facebookers-and-ever/

In humans, learning & socialisation is by far the biggest thing affecting our day-to-day behaviour. Humans are born with less instincts than other animals (baby deer walk within a few hours of birth etc) but have a much bigger capacity to learn and adapt to the environment.

So, following Cordelina Fine, I think that learning / socialization should be the default explanation for differences in behaviour, and innate factors should only be considered when that is ruled out.

the one exception is aggression, which has been strongly shown to be linked to testosterone and to men.

I think this is probably the case:

• there are some differences between the behaviours of women and men that are innate, or the result of biological factors (hormones, chromosomes)
• there are some differences in behaviour that are completely about socialization (girls choose pink, boys choose blue)
• but I suspect there are probably loads of differences in behaviour that have a biological root but are heavily amplified by socialization

So what I think is happening is that there are different personality traits that are distributed unevenly across the sexes, so that you might say :on a very broad scale women on average have a greater tendency to display trait X than men". But that then gets transformed to "all women display trait X more than all men" and then "we expect a woman to show trait X". And that's where you arrive at gender in the way feminists used to use the term, to mean expectations about the way women and men do behave and should behave.

What about the effect of exogenous testosterone on women?

Though, again, there's more to unpick: athletes already demonstrate competitiveness and transmen already believe they will be more confident on testosterone.

A year after I took up position as a computer science teacher, equal numbers of girls and boys chose computer science as a gcse option. This was the first time in seven years of it being offered that the numbers had come even close to being even, having had only males teaching the subject previously. The number of boys remained constant, the number of girls rose to match them.

I am sympathetic to Prions position, especially regarding sex based behaviour and aggression, but it’s very hard to unpick higher level choices and the effect of things like a lack of representation on those choices.

It’s an interesting question, OP, but the reality is that nobody knows.

It does amaze me though, as someone who works with animals, how many people (and in particular feminists) believe that the differences are all down to socialisation and none of it is innate. It’s obvious to me that in most mammals there are differences between average male behaviour and average female behaviour, which most likely is a result of different hormones working on the brain.

Cordelia Fine has two great books on this "Delusions of gender" and "testosterone rex" (neither is about trans people fyi) that go into how much more than we expect of our behaviour that we assume is gendered is actually caused by social factors

It's psychologically shown that when you tell people they're going to do worse on a task they will actually perform worse, and society has been telling women to expect less of themselves for centuries